This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL
D.H. Lawrence was very much against your so-called education — it is not education, it is mis-education. Real education can only be based on love, not on knowledge. Real education cannot be utilitarian, real education cannot be of the marketplace. Not that real education will not give you knowledge; first, real education will prepare your heart, your love, and then whatever knowledge is needed to pass through life will be given to you, but that will be secondary. And it will never be overpowering; it will not be more valuable than love. And whenever there is a possibility of any conflict between love and knowledge, real education will help you to be ready to drop your knowledge and move with your love; it will give you courage, it will give you adventure. It will give you space to live, accepting all risks, insecurities; it will help you to be ready to sacrifice yourself if love demands it. It will put love not only above knowledge but even above life, because life is meaningless without love. Love without life is still meaningful; even if your body dies it makes no difference to your love energy. It continues, it is eternal, it is not a time phenomenon. To have a loving heart, you need a little less calculating head. To be capable of loving you need to be capable of wondering. That’s why, Nur, I always say that awe and childlike innocence are deeply related with the energy called love. In fact they are different names for the same thing.
Awe | Body | Education | Energy | Innocence | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Love | Need | Sacrifice | Space | Time | Will |
Paul Bourget, fully Paul Charles Joseph Bourget
It is vain to try to sacrifice once for all one's youthful ideals. When a man has loved literature as I loved it at twenty, he cannot be satisfied at twenty-six to give up his early passion, even at the bidding of implacable necessity.
Literature | Man | Sacrifice |
It includes everything. If there is suffering, then it is best to accept it, because it won't go away because you pretend it is not there. If there is joy, then it is best to accept that too, even though you are afraid it might end someday. Some people can only relate to life through sacrifice and renunciation. Some people only feel part of humanity when they think they are happy… It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over. Slowly, I began to realize that I could not go back and force things to be as they once were: those two years, which up until then had seemed an endless inferno, were now beginning to show me their true meaning.
Beginning | Force | Humanity | Important | Life | Life | Past | People | Sacrifice | Afraid | Think |
Do not get used to it because it is easy to become a habit, it is a powerful drug. It is in the everyday life of us, in the suffering that we try to cover it, the sacrifices we make, blaming love for the breakup of their dreams. The pain was terrible when it displays its true face, but it temptation, appealing as it is disguised as a sacrifice or self-denial or cowardice. However, the more denial, as we found a way to exist with it, with the courtship of it and turn it into a part of our lives. I do not believe it. No one wants to suffer at all. If I think I could live without pain, that would be a big step, but do not imagine that others will understand me. Yes, the truth is that no one wants to suffer, even those who are still looking for pain and sacrifice there, but they feel they are reasonable, clearly there, and they are receiving the respect of human so, husbands, neighbors, and even God. Now we do not think about it anymore; everything you need to know is how to control this world spinning, not a journey in search of pleasure, but forget their sacrifice for all, that's important. There must a soldier participating in war is to kill the enemy or not? No, he left to sacrifice for the fatherland. Having a wife wants her husband to find himself not happy how? No, she wants her husband saw how sincere she endured as to how to make him happy. There must be a husband to do because they think he will find the fully meet individual needs in the workplace? No, he's brought the sweat and tears of the fine in exchange for peace to the family. And so life there are boys abandon their dreams to please their parents, parents give their lives for their children; pain and suffering are used to justify a bring only joy: love.
Boys | Control | Dreams | Enemy | Happy | Husband | Individual | Journey | Justify | Kill | Life | Life | Love | Need | Pain | Parents | Peace | Respect | Sacrifice | Search | Self-denial | Suffering | Tears | Truth | Wants | War | Wife | Will | World | Respect | Think | Understand |
We refuse to look at life as a great adventure that has no limits… We pretend to be strong because we are weak… We show our strength, so that no one can see our frailty. That is why, whenever you judge your brother, be aware that it is you who is in the dock… We should never condemn the lives of others, because everyone knows how great the pain and sacrifice him. One has to think you found the right path, quite another to think your way is the only option… There is no tragedy, only the unavoidable. Everything has its reason for being: you only need to distinguish what is temporary from what is lasting… There is one great truth on this planet: whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth.
Adventure | Desire | Distinguish | Life | Life | Mission | Need | Pain | Reason | Right | Sacrifice | Soul | Truth | Think |
Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
The hospitality of primitive peoples, respect for human life, the sense of reciprocal obligation, compassion for the weak, courage, extending even to the sacrifice of self for others which is first learnt for the sake of children and friends, and later for that of members of the same community — all these qualities are developed in man anterior to all law, independently of all religion, as in the case of the social animals. Such feelings and practices are the inevitable results of social life. Without being, as say priests and metaphysicans, inherent in man, such qualities are the consequence of life in common.
Children | Compassion | Feelings | Hospitality | Inevitable | Life | Life | Man | Qualities | Respect | Sacrifice | Self | Sense | Respect |
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases. He wishes to dispose of his own time, to be governed only by necessity, to choose his friendships, his recreation, and his discipline; to act from judgment, not by command; to sacrifice himself through selfishness, not through servile obligation. Communism is essentially opposed to the free exercise of our faculties, to our noblest desires, to our deepest feelings. Any plan which could be devised for reconciling it with the demands of the individual reason and will would end only in changing the thing while preserving the name. Now, if we are honest truth-seekers, we shall avoid disputes about words.
Individual | Labor | Law | Man | Oppression | Plan | Reason | Sacrifice | Will | Wishes |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
It always means that you must sacrifice something very dear to you when His call comes.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.
In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. There are some authors of so-called objective, scientific publications in the field of psychology who remind me of the officer in Kafka's Penal Colony in their zeal and their consistent self-destructiveness. In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka's convicted prisoner, on the other hand, we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required.
Adolescence | Better | Childhood | Commitment | Consequences | Disguise | Energy | Feelings | Force | Knowledge | Learning | Machines | Means | Order | People | Power | Psychology | Regard | Sacrifice | Study | Time | Understanding | Wonder | Zeal |
Quintilian, fully Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, also Quintillian and Quinctilian NULL
That laughter costs too much which is purchased by the sacrifice of decency.
I read your categories of humanism with interest. They seem to me to be excellent and will be useful to me. As for myself, I do not know exactly where I fit. I do not know the realities of the cosmos. I only know that man with his hopes and aspirations, his capacity to sacrifice for an ideal is part of it. He uses the abilities with which he is endowed not only to maintain life but to find some meaning for it. His efforts to discover meaning ends in mystery. His attempt through the use of reason to add to his knowledge of the cosmos has brought a vast increase in that knowledge beyond the frontiers of which, however, lies mystery. To push out this frontier, to penetrate the mystery is his greatest challenge. I find that contemplation of the mystery brings that humility which is one of the virtues taught by religion. For me the aspirations (part of the cosmos) of men suggest an essence or being greater than man, worship of whom gives added strength for dealing with the vicissitudes of life.
Capacity | Contemplation | Ends | Humility | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Men | Mystery | Reason | Sacrifice | Strength | Will | Worship | Vicissitudes | Contemplation |
Sacrifice thy will for others, that they may be disposed to sacrifice their wills for thee.
Reinhold Niebuhr, fully Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr
The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control. Since it is impossible to count on enough moral goodwill among those who possess irresponsible power to sacrifice it for the good of the whole, it must be destroyed by coercive methods and these will always run the peril of introducing new forms of injustice in place of those abolished.
Enough | Good | Injustice | Injustice | Man | Peril | Power | Sacrifice | Stupidity | Will |
To which god must I sacrifice in order to heal? To which of the warring serpents should I turn with the problem that now faces me? It is easy, and tempting, to choose the god of Science. Now I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is its symbol. It is a powerful god indeed but it is what the students of ancient gods called a shape-shifter, and sometimes a trickster.
Whoever you may be, I caution you against rashly defaming the author of this work, or cavilling in jest against him. Nay, do not silently reproach him in consequence of others' censure, nor employ your wit in foolish disapproval or false accusation. For, should Democritus Junior prove to be what he professes, even a kinsman of his elder namesake, or be ever so little of the same kidney, it is all up with you: he will become both accuser and judge of you in his petulant spleen, will dissipate you in jest, pulverize you with witticisms, and sacrifice you, I can promise you, to the God of Mirth.
Caution | God | Little | Promise | Sacrifice | Will | Wit | God |